What do I see on the stills of Uri Geller stroking a spoon? I see him holding a teaspoon and stroking it; after a while, it bends and finally breaks in two. At least that is true if the frames of the film are in their actual sequence. As a matter of fact I do not find that film at all interesting, because it is not an experiment; the film was made some time ago, and all I can do now is to talk to the director or Uri Geller about what happened in the past. We cannot be sure where the spoon came from and we do not actually know whether Geller bent it with ordinary pressure from his hands. However, by looking at the actual film in motion, I can get a little more information because his fingers do not appear to be touching the spoon with any force, certainly not enough to bend it: but this is still not nearly sufficient information. An experimenter has to declare everything he did very clearly indeed, so that other people have a chance of repeating his work.

In the television series, I straightened a piece of wire by stroking it. Well, that is what it looked like! Actually, the wire is made of a special alloy which has a 'memory' of what shape it was in when it was first made. It is called Nitinol. If it was made straight and you then bend it by hand, when you heat it, it straightens up again. So when I stroked it in front of the camera what I really did was to move the wire into a stream of hot air and so it straightened. There was nothing paranormal about that. A thick teaspoon, however, is a different matter. Also in the programme, I bent a teaspoon made of perfectly hard metal. Now I could have bent it by hand pressure too. So I clipped the handle onto a letter balance, so that when I touched the spoon, you could see how much pressure I put on it with my finger. The spoon bent and finally the bowl dropped off. This time I used a spoon made from a special alloy which melts at about the temperature of boiling water. So, once again, when I started stroking it I actually moved it slightly into a stream of hot air, so the heat softened it, then bent it and finally melted it altogether. That is another bad experiment because I did not declare everything about the spoon metal.

One might conclude that there is nothing paranormal in metal bending, but that is not the case at all. It is an interesting phenomenon and quite central to the question of whether the mind can affect matter. By the pledges I have made to you so far, there ought to be some good experiments on metal bending. There are, and some of the results are very interesting. However, there is another problem we ought to look at at this stage.

Because the results of experiments like metal bending are so odd and so bizarre, the precautions experimenters have had to take are much more stringent than in any other area of research science. As I have suggested earlier, I sometimes think that if the standards of rigour which are used in some experiments on the paranormal were applied to experiments in ordinary science, half of the results there would fall apart. Why are such special precautions necessary?

Science is by its very nature extremely conservative, and this is thoroughly to the advantage of science. Any new concept or idea has to withstand the most rigorous and searching scrutiny before it is accepted. That this is often overdone is obvious; bad temper and polemic often creep in. On balance, however, it is better than allowing cant and superstition to rule reason.

So there is a tremendous reluctance to allow the stranger areas of the paranormal like psychokinesis any credence at all, because they upset a lot of preconceived notions. That is perfectly reasonable. Most of ordinary science works very well. It is repeatable, it is reliable and it is consistent. It is particular areas of science itself like the new physics which are now changing and suggesting a world view in which psychokinesis is possible.

For example, ordinary physics and biology would say that the energy binding the atoms of a teaspoon together is far too great for a soft watery organ like the brain to emit sufficient energy to alter the atoms enough to make the spoon bend. That by itself is true; there is no way I can see myself sending out enough energy from my brain to do it. Later on, however, I will be describing new ideas in physics which suggest that this is an over-simple way of looking at the connection between subject and teaspoon.

How can a brain do that? We would have to have some sort of power generator in our heads which could give off that sort of energy. So, if it happens, there must be some other explanation, and the real problem we have to face here is that some very experienced scientists are doing well controlled experimental work which suggests that it does happen.

This is what they did. First, they had to find a device which would measure metal bending. Of course, you will object that that is totally unnecessary: you just look and see metal bending for yourself. But that is only if the bending is big enough, which is called macroscopic bending; this long word is opposite to microscopic. Microscopic bending, according to the proper use of words, is bending which cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The experimenters in fact suspected that some cases of paranormal metal bending were probably microscopic, in that the metal would only show very, very small deflections, which the eye could not in fact see.

They therefore used a tiny sensor like the ones in Fig. 37 and attached it to one piece of metal with a special glue. The sensor is called a strain gauge and it can record very, very small movements in metal. Remember, a sensor is a device designed to give a particular signal when it detects a particular event. A thermometer is a sensor, because it gives a signal about heat. The signal is the level of the mercury in the tube. In a strain gauge the signals first go to an amplifier to make them bigger, and then on to a pen recorder to make the bigger signals visible. When the metal is deformed or bent very, very slightly, the strain gauge sends out a large signal about the bend through the apparatus, and the pen recorder makes a picture of it.

That looks far too sensitive. How can we be sure that the strain gauge would not produce a signal without any bending of the metal? Could it not just go off by itself? Yes, it could and does. So the first question we have to ask anyone using it is how they got over that particular difficulty. Any scientist using a new piece of equipment carries out what he calls a calibration. This means that he sets up the whole apparatus and just leaves it running by itself to see how much noise it produces. The word noise in this sense means only the force and number of spurious signals the machine produces by itself before it is set to work detecting signals. Once the noise level is recorded and measured, any larger signal the machine produces when it is detecting signals can be confidently assumed to be real and not spurious.

John Hasted is a large and friendly man with an acute, critical mind. He thinks for himself. He is Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College in the University of London and has for some years now been doing experiments on paranormal metal bending. There are as many different approaches to physics as there are physicists and John Hasted's is one of pure experimentation. If you talk to him about theory he will discuss matters with you courteously and with interest. But get him onto experiments, and his eyes light up and he starts to move quickly, sketch on the board and construct models of ideas with whatever is to hand.

In the basement of Birkbeck College, he has set up a laboratory to investigate people who say they can bend metal with their minds. First there is a screened room. This is a small cubicle made of aluminium sheet. It prevents spurious electrical signals getting in. Birkbeck College is full of physicists who are doing experiments which generate electrical and electronic signals, and these easily penetrate laboratory walls and interfere with other nearby equipment.

Inside the cubicle there is a chair where the subject sits. In front of the chair, the small strip of metal to be experimented on is suspended. Attached to the metal is the small strain gauge. A cable leads from the gauge to a bench outside the cubicle where the amplifier and the pen recorder are located. Between the piece of metal and the subject, there is a ring-shaped coil which will detect if the subject stretches forward actually to touch the metal.

We come now to the extraordinary feature of John Hasted's experiments. He now has a considerable body of evidence to show that some people can, without touch, cause the metal to bend enough to make the strain gauge register deflection many times larger than the top level of the noise in the apparatus. Could this sort of signal be generated spuriously from some other source?

To guard against this possibility, Professor Hasted has built a 'dummy' recording circuit alongside the real one, so that if any spurious signal does get generated somewhere other than in the metal, the 'dummy' circuit will record it as well. Finally, he records electrical activity on the surface of the shielded cubicle as well, to see whether any unwanted information is being generated there. [1]

John Hasted has now completed many thousands of individual experiments showing significant strain-gauge deflections with young subjects. One problem he found with early experiments was that the laboratory situation upset several of his subjects. To solve this, he has also designed portable apparatus so that he can visit the home of the subject. In this way, he takes the laboratory to the subject rather than vice versa.

At the time of writing this section, I have just been to a meeting of scientists where Professor Hasted gave an account of his latest work. The question he set out to answer was this. If, he argued, the metal was bent paranormally and the strain gauge showed a significant deflection, then would there be any internal changes in the metal which could be measured? To experiment on this he used a technique which sounds difficult, but in essence is very easy to understand. The method is called 'Rutherford Back Scattering' after Ernest Rutherford, one of the great pioneer scientists of early atomic research.

It is possible to 'inject' other atoms deep into a piece of metal so that they end up rather like peas in a jelly in various positions. Then by subjecting the piece of metal to a particular radiation, you can plot where the injected 'foreign' atoms are inside the metal. This technique was used to investigate a Frenchman who claimed to bend metal paranormally. [2] And John Hasted has now shown that there is a change in the position of the foreign injected atoms after the piece of metal had been exposed to a putative metal bender.

It is difficult to see how anyone could possibly cause internal changes like this in the metal, unless, of course, one is going to assume that there was some elaborate conspiracy involving subjects, John Hasted, laboratory technicians, metallurgists and so on.

I faced Stephen North, one of John Hasted's most successful young subjects, with the accusation that he was faking the whole thing. His reply was low key and sincere. Here is a transcript of how he replied:

KP: Stephen, you've been doing these experiments with Professor Hasted for a long time now and trying to bend metal by paranormal means. What does it feel like inside when you're doing the experiments?

SN: There's very little physical sensation, but it's certainly very important for me to be in a relaxed state of mind. It doesn't work very well when I try to concentrate.

KP: So when you're really trying to do it very hard it doesn't work?

SN: No, it doesn't; it's essential to be relaxed.

KP: Is it as if it catches you out, that it happens when you've turned your mind away from it?

SN: Yes, that's right.

KP: Do you feel very different from other people because you can do this?

SN: No, I'm - in fact I find, certainly amongst my generation and my friends, they all accept it and, you know, treat me normally. A few adults aren't very willing to treat me as a normal person ...

KP: They treat you as some sort of freak, do they?

SN: Yes, but it doesn't make me feel any different. I lead a completely normal life.

KP: If an adult comes to you and says, look, I don't believe you're doing it, how do you feel about that?

SN: Well, if I was in their position, if I was in the audience watching a television programme about this or something similar, I would feel sceptical about it because I haven't actually seen it proved. But I know it happens and I know that I can do it and all I can hope is that gradually I'll be able to convince more people.

KP: Do you think it's something you could teach to other people? Is there some sort of form in your mind as to how it works, or is it too odd to talk about?

SN: Certainly I don't know how I can do it, but there are ways I can stop it from happening. For instance, when I first started to do it, everything in my house began to bend, all the cutlery bent and gradually I found I could stop that when I wanted to, and I can stop from damaging my watch or my own keys. But I don't think it can be taught, but I believe that everybody can probably do it; it's just finding how to.

KP: Do you think the ability to do it will stay with you or is it something you expect might disappear as you get older?

SN: Certainly I think it would disappear if I left it, if I allowed my mind to concentrate on other things.

KP: Do you want to hang on to it?

SN: Yes, I do.

KP: You would like to hang on to it?

SN: Yes, I would.

KP: What does it mean to you as a person?

SN: It's very important. I want to find out what it is and what's causing it.

KP: Have you any idea in your own mind as to what could be causing it?

SN: Not really. I believe that I'm simply focussing some kind of energy which science doesn't yet understand.

I then asked Professor Hasted how he came to start work on metal bending; it seems such a strange thing for a physicist to be doing, to look at something which is so bizarre. He replied:

Well, physics itself is much more magical and bizarre than that. Down on the atomic scale I can't tell you the position of an atom exactly; I don't even know if an atom exists. It only probably exists. It could even be in two places at once. I don't know how many dimensions we're in; I don't know if our space is simple or complex. All of these things are far more bizarre than just a piece of metal deforming.

At first I was surprised by this reply, but now having had long conversations with several of the world's best physicists, I can only say that time and time again, the same sort of comment was made; that they were sure that the new physics was revealing a view of the universe which was indeterminate, inseparable into parts and utterly strange to our senses.

What is more difficult to grasp is that they were also finding that it was not possible to observe anything without assuming right at the start, that the mind is connected with the matter that the mind is observing.

So now, back to physics.

Back to chapter list

Back to books

Back to main index

Back to Uri Geller's home page.